Are human rights universal?

Abstract

Natural rights and human rights Natural rights are the ancestor of contemporary human rights; and the idea of natural rights was a doctrine of universal rights, at least of those basic moral rights that were thought to hold good in a state of nature. The UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) is the keystone of contemporary human rights thinking, and it proceeds from the view that the human rights enunciated there have a foundation in morality and are universal. By the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the notion of natural rights had lost or begun to lose its appeal (see Waldron 1987, for excerpts from some of the main critics). After World War II, universal rights made a return to center stage, first in the United Nations Charter (1945) and then in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR, 1948) and the various covenants and treaties respecting human rights that came after that. But this return was not simply a revival of old-style natural rights. Indeed, many writers today (e.g., Beitz 2009; Boucher 2009; Darby 2009) stress that there is a considerable discontinuity between natural rights and what are today called human rights.